Thais Pujol Acosta: You can't be a university student and a "counterrevolutionary" in Cuba

Abstract

In November 1991, Thais Pujol Acosta was in her second year of her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana (UH). The young woman was friends with writer María Elena Cruz Varela, who enjoyed great prestige among Cuban intellectuals and had received, among others, the "Julián del Casal" National Poetry Prize (1989). Cruz Varela was a member of Criterio Alternativo, a dissident group that brought together intellectuals who polemicized the Cuban reality in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of which Thais' father, José Luis Pujol, had been one of the founders.